When Boris Johnson met President Zelensky in Kyiv in April 2022, he was one of the first western leaders to visit Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion.
In Kyiv, Johnson was lauded for his bravery and his support for the besieged Ukrainian nation. Back home, his critics suggested that the prime minister was perhaps glad of the chance to divert attention from the political scandals that would eventually lead to his downfall.
In Russia, however, Johnson’s trip to Ukraine is now being portrayed by the Kremlin as something far more sinister: an intervention that derailed a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, ensuring that there would be no early end to the biggest conflict in Europe since 1945.
In recent months Moscow has accused Johnson of vetoing an agreement that it says would have led to Russia withdrawing troops, in exchange for Kyiv abandoning its aspirations to join Nato and pledging neutrality.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, claimed late last year that Johnson had ordered Zelensky not to agree to any peace deals with Moscow. “Johnson banned Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia following negotiations in Istanbul at the end of March 2022 and demanded the continuation of hostilities against Russia,” she said.
Moscow’s allegations were prompted by comments made by David Arakhamia, who was Ukraine’s lead negotiator at talks in Belarus and Turkey with Russian officials in the early months of the war. Arakhamia, who is a senior MP with Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, told Ukrainian media in November that Moscow’s main aim at the talks was to force Ukraine to formally renounce its Nato ambitions.
“They really hoped almost to the last that they would pressure us into signing an agreement to accept neutrality. This was the most important thing for them to be ready to end the war. If we accepted, as Finland once did, neutrality, and pledged that we will not join Nato,” he said.
He stressed, however, that the Ukrainian delegation had no trust in Russia and that it had lacked the authority to accept Moscow’s terms, even if it had wanted to. Ukraine’s ambitions to secure membership of Nato are written into the country’s constitution.
Arakhamia also said that after the talks Johnson advised Ukraine’s leadership that it should “not sign anything with [Russia] at all, and let’s just fight”. Russian officials have cited Arakhamia’s interview as evidence that Ukraine is controlled by western “puppetmasters”.
Johnson has now responded to Moscow’s claims that he wrecked a peace deal. “This is nothing but total nonsense and Russian propaganda,” he told The Times. He also said that during the discussions with Zelensky after the Istanbul talks, he had been concerned about the nature of any potential agreement and had pledged that Britain would support Ukraine “a thousand per cent”.
“I was a bit worried at that stage. I could not see for the life of me what the deal could be, and I thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
Johnson’s denials were echoed by Arakhamia, who said that Russia deliberately distorted his comments to support its own narratives about the war. Johnson’s “just fight” comments were made in the context of consultations with Ukraine’s western allies about how to combat Russia’s invasion, he said. He also insisted that it would have been impossible for any western officials to issue orders to Zelensky.
“Neither then nor now do any of our [western] partners give Ukraine instructions on how to build its defences or what political decisions to take. This is the sovereign right of the Ukrainian leadership,” Arakhamia told The Times.
He added: “No peace proposals or peace agreement were possible in February or March 2022. Russia entered Ukraine solely for the sake of seizing territories, killing citizens and overthrowing a democratic government. There were no other goals. The main task of the Ukrainian delegation was obvious: to achieve at least a 24 or 48-hour ceasefire.”
After Johnson’s visit to Kyiv, Downing Street said that he had “urged against any negotiations with Russia on terms that gave credence to the Kremlin’s false narrative for the invasion, but stressed that this was a decision for the Ukrainian government”.
Putin has also weighed into the row over what exactly happened at the negotiations. Last year he showed African leaders at a meeting in St Petersburg what he said was a signed draft agreement between Russia and Ukraine that would have set limits on Kyiv’s armed forces in return for the Kremlin calling off its invasion. Putin also claimed last month at his annual press conference that the deal had been agreed but was later “chucked away into the stove”. Ukraine says no deals were signed and that any final agreements would only have been possible at a meeting between Putin and Zelensky.
Putin issued an ultimatum to Nato just months before he launched his invasion that included demands for the western military alliance to cease its eastwards expansion and withdraw troops and weaponry from countries that had been accepted into the bloc after 1997. He described Nato’s presence on Russia’s western flank as a danger to its national security.
However, analysts suggest that Putin’s real concern was the loss of Russian influence in Ukraine, whose right to exist as a sovereign state he has questioned on several occasions. The Kremlin said in May 2022 that it had no significant concerns about Sweden or Finland joining Nato. “[This] does not pose a direct threat to Russia,” Putin said.
Angela Stent, a former adviser to the White House on Russia, said that a western official had told her that Johnson’s trip to Kyiv in April 2022 was intended as a morale booster. She also said that she found it hard to imagine that any western politician would be able to successfully order Zelensky to take decisions. “Western officials have on occasion found Zelensky resistant to some of the things that they were suggesting,” she said, citing widely reported disagreements between Kyiv and US officials over the tactics for Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive last year.
There have also been doubts regarding Russia’s seriousness about seeking peace, given that its delegation at the 2022 talks failed to include any high-level political figures. Moscow’s top negotiator was Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who is also the author of books that promote the Kremlin’s view of history.
Any hopes of peace were shattered after the discovery of hundreds of civilians who had been tortured and murdered by Russian troops in Bucha, a small town near Kyiv, in April 2022. Putin said that the scenes of slaughter were fake, while Medinsky claimed that Bucha had been selected for the alleged false-flag attack because it sounded like “butcher”. He also said that Russian troops were “genetically incapable” of carrying out such atrocities.
Russian negotiators even claimed at one of the final peace talk meetings that the massacre was a staged operation that had been carried out by Ukrainian special services and MI6, Arakhamia said. “Russian propaganda has always had a tendency to blame Britain for everything,” he said.
• This year Putin faces election, Ukraine war stalemate and an egg crisis
Support is growing in Ukraine for surrendering territory to Russia in exchange for an end to the fighting, according to an opinion poll. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found last month that 19 per cent of Ukrainians would now accept such a move. The figure has almost doubled since May.
Zelensky has insisted that the war will only be over when Ukraine has recaptured all of its territory, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. However, the former Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has urged Zelensky to present a “plan B” to end the fighting.
“Propose a way out of this difficult, tragic situation. Show leadership,” she said in a message posted on social media last month. She did not offer any suggestions herself as to what such a plan would look like.
Although Tymoshenko, who served twice as prime minister between 2005 and 2010, is widely distrusted by voters, according to opinion polls, her comments are likely to resonate with some Ukrainians as casualties grow and American weapons supplies dwindle amid a row in the US Congress over the future of military assistance for Kyiv.
“Right now only a minority of Ukrainians are in favour of peace talks, but their number could increase,” the Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said. “But there is an understanding in Kyiv and in the White House that you can’t start talks from a weak position. And our position certainly isn’t strong at the moment.”
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said last week that Kyiv was confident that the US Congress would approve additional military assistance. “We don’t have a plan B,” he told CNN. “Ukraine will always fight with the resources available to it.”
